Susan Williams

Just picking up on something you said there, I guess finding the right people who this model suits would have been a challenge initially?

Yes, initially because we were really looking for people who like to work but don’t need to work because we don’t offer regular hours. Most of them work about three to four days a week in the capital cities. Our average employee age is about 54, so at that age bracket generally what happens is they are grandparents, so they want to spend time being grandparents and enjoying their grandchildren or they’ll have elderly family or their husband might get sick or their parents might get sick. So they need a flexible workplace because they want to be everywhere, they want to be with their grandchildren, they want to be with their partner or parents. And this type of work gives them that flexibility, that they can still have a job and that they can still do everything else. Some people at that age would like to do charity work so they can just mark themselves off like every Thursday and work at the Red Cross or they might want to play tennis. So it’s sort of a job where you can work it to suit yourself.

You’ve deliberately hired a lot of mature age workers. Is that a talent pool that was a little bit unused?

I think at that age group, they’re all loyal, they’re hard working, they’re punctual, they’ have realistic ambitions. They don’t want to be running the company within a month of joining it. You know what I’m talking about.

They’re just fantastic and they also like working in teams. And they understand that it’s not always about them. So we might send them to some job and it’s not quite exactly what we told them but they understand that things happen and changes happen and they’re really good about it.

I must say that for anyone that runs a business, staff are the hardest thing. But hiring the mature age with old-fashioned values, they’re just so different. So I’ve just surrounded myself with that sort of workforce and also I think when they are going to people’s homes, the client sees that they are well presented, they’re well spoken and they’re intelligent and they’re going to set up their home, they trust them straight away. And they’re well groomed, if you ask them to wear black or wear black shoes or whatever you’d ask them to do, I’d say 95% of the time they do. They just do it because that’s the way they’ve been brought up.

There’s a different level of customer service required when you go into somebody’s home. Do you need to do extra training for that sort of relationship, because I guess you’re seeing right into a person’s life when you’re unpacking their stuff?

Yes, we hire people that basically have got good personal skills. So they could have been a retail employee or a nurse or a teacher, or a mother that’s been dealing with teenage children. We normally hire empty nesters because when the children are young they still need plenty of time with their children and our busiest time is when the children are on school holidays.

For example, at Christmas we want every single person in all of the country working at Finishing Touch. So that’s why we intend to hire ladies that have got teenagers or grown up children because that’s the time of the year that we need the mums, not the children.

How does the cyclical nature of the property market affect you? Is that a big influence on the business?

It is, actually. In the last 10 years it’s been booming and people have been getting ridiculous prices for their houses, so I think what they look at is the stamp duty that they pay and all the other fees that they pay and our service could be a cheap as a couple of hundred dollars, so they think they’ll spoil themselves and they’ll have an unpacking service as well. So it’s really built our business with the booming market.

The relationships that you have with the moving companies would be crucial for lead generation, but is there any other marketing you’ve done? Obviously word-of-mouth would be very important.

That’s probably our biggest – word-of-mouth and repeat businesses. So generally what happens is anyone that we’ve actually unpacked for, they might have only had eight hours of first service. And the next time they use our service they might take 16 and then the third time they’ll use us they’ll have everything done. Because once they realise how fantastic it is and how great the ladies are, they just want more of the service. Our best sales team are actually the people that have used the service.

In terms of growing the business, is it more about introducing more services?

That’s what we’ve done. So we started off doing the valet, like unpacking, setting up the homes and then about 10 years ago we started doing the pre-packing as well, that’s where we go in and pack up the house. So for example we can come to your house, pack it all up, organise a removal company to actually remove it all and then have the same lady to come in and unpack it all, knowing exactly where everything was. And that is the best result because they can go interstate or overseas, we can just manage the whole thing and we get the same women that packed the kitchen, they’ll unpack the kitchen.

The second new service is just getting people organised for their move because a lot of people are downsizing and so what we need to do is help them get ready by sorting and getting rid of things because the less things that you take, the cheaper it’s going to become. And if you’re downsizing, all the things that you own are not going fit into a smaller place. So that’s called our pre-move assistance.

And then we have another one called de-cluttering. So when someone’s putting a house up for sale, we can come in and move things out for them and de-clutter that way. And we also have another service called the freshen up services where we might have unpacked for them and then three months later, they’ll phone up and go “the house is a mess, the kids have messed up the whole house and can you do the linen press?” And we do folding really nicely and colour coordinate their clothes, we do all these extra things which is just our normal service. When we open all the cupboards and go, “look, these are your clothes” the client just nearly cries.

What are some of the challenges you’ve found as the business has grown? Staff is one, but have there been any other major obstacles that you’ve had to work through?

Well, the last 12 months has been a little bit quieter.

Any strategies that you could use during that time?

We were about 15-20% down so our business model was actually quite good because everyone’s casual so that means that everyone’s got less hours so we just divided the hours among everybody. The interesting thing is we didn’t really lose anyone, maybe a few that their husbands may have lost their jobs so they may have had to go to full-time work. But in our office, because we’re all full-time when we’re busy, we all work two to three days a week, except for me. But everyone cuts their hours down so we were able to budget our business that way and it worked out fantastically. We’ve popped out and we are perfectly fine. We all just looked at it knowing that it was going to be bad, so we’ve just took less hours and enjoyed doing other things, like tidying up our own houses.

It’s the ultimate scalable business model really, isn’t it?

It is, we’ve invested a lot of money in technology so basically even from my iPhone, I can look at our computer system and I can schedule a job and I can see everything of what’s happening within my business because the technology that we run is just amazing.

I guess it has to be so robust when your team is so dispersed and reliant on that technology. So looking ahead what are the growth opportunities that you see?

Well we’re getting a lot more expats coming back to Australia so we’ve sort of tapped into them and we’re getting a lot more work that way. And also with moving, people used to move every seven years, now they move every four years, so that’s a real advantage for our sort of business. And then you’ve got all the migrants coming to Australia, a lot of them are professionals and they are skilled and they might have come from third world countries where they’ve got servants.

And also because of the pricing of the houses that’s making everyone more affluent so we’re getting more business there. And renovations, that’s another big part as well because the people that aren’t moving, their house might have been worth $400,000 in Ormond (Melbourne) five years ago and now it’s worth $1 million so they’re going out and borrowing another $500,000 and renovating, so we get to do that work as well. And we get to do insurance work.

But to tell you the truth it is not us out there marketing, it’s people out there referring business our way.

But it doesn’t sort of happen by accident. We have all these check points through our jobs that we phone the client the day before, on the day, the day after. Our group leader checks with the client before she starts, half way through the job, at the end, opens up all the cupboards. So we have all these checkpoints throughout our business so if there is going to be a problem, we know while we’re in the house so we stay until that problem is solved so we don’t end up with a problem on the desk the next day. And that’s where the women that we employ are smart enough to pick that up and then our scheduler phones the jobs and she knows if someone’s not quite kosher about something.